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Now you don’t have to like Nikolai Rozhenko or his episode by far. But he was mentioned before season seven. In fact, it was in season one’s “Heart of Glory” that he was mentioned. It was just a “blink or you’ll miss it reference that only die hard geeks like me remembered.

Gotta remember: they weren’t aiming to make an episode about deep philosophy, politics and racial unity . . . they didn’t have time for that BS because they were trying to make an episode to entertain the viewers. It was season seven, which is one season longer than the show should have run. The show was going downhill and they had to pad out the season till they could get to the final episodes and give it a decent farewell.
I’d been loving the show since the third season and even I realized it was time to pull the plug on the series back then. The last thing they needed was for awesome writing to suddenly emerge and grab peoples’ attention when the show needed to die and the cast move on to movies and other projects. ST:TNG had become a big part of my teen years and I hated to see it go, but I knew it was time as poor episodes only soured what was once such an awesome series.
Despite the feelings of some I believe Picard and Crusher’s open dialog was too long in coming. Looking back I still wish the show had gotten more into Jean Luc’s relationship with Beverly. There was history before ‘Encounter at Farpoint’ and I felt it should have come out much sooner in some way. The writers and producers were just too busy making things up as they went along that they didn’t plan things out in this manner. Like many people, I’d love to see what could have emerged if more planning had been done at the start of the series.

To me, this was why the Worf/Troi relationship of season seven pissed off so many people. There were two couples we’d been eased with since the beginning: Picard/Crusher and Riker/Troi, and we never got much of a payoff on either. But, you know, in some ways, I think season seven was a kind of wrapping up loose ends from season one than anything else. After all, we got the Picard/Crush relationship coming to the surface, payoff on Worf’s adoptive brother after a throwaway line, the conclusion of the Wesley/Traveler story, and even a confirmation that O’Brien was the unnamed extra on the battle bridge in “Encounter at Farpoint.”

Just watched a great documentary on how ST:TNG came to be and it explains why the first two seasons were so bad/different compared to what came afterward. ‘Chaos on the Bridge’ (2014) is available on Netflix and is hosted by William Shatner. There are interviews with some of the TNG cast and many of the writers, producers and studio heads from back in the day. Definitely worth a look.

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